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Genealogy Blog

Today the Anne Frank House is launching the official Anne Frank Channel on YouTube containing existing and new images about Anne Frank. These include excerpts from interviews with Otto Frank and witnesses like Miep Gies, as well as previews of the virtual museum of the Anne Frank House, soon to be opened to the public. With the Anne Frank Channel on YouTube, people around the world will be able to explore the life and significance of Anne Frank through unique images.

The channel opens with the only existing film footage of Anne Frank, made during the wedding of her neighbor on 22 July 1941. In another film, Nelson Mandela talks about the strength he derived from Anne Frank’s diary during his imprisonment on Robben Island. The channel will also contain a series of new interviews with people who knew Anne Frank personally.

President Lincoln’s eloquent reference to "the mystic chords of memory" resonates today as we celebrate the importance of archives. The American record has enduring value and America’s archives – in all their diversity of form and function – serve as its memory.

American Archives Month is an opportunity "all over this broad land" to raise awareness about the value of archives – and archivists. This 2009 American Archives Month Public Relations Kit provides basic materials that we hope you will adapt to make your own archives program more visible and more appreciated.

A unique leisure attraction on approximately 10 acres of land. Harperley POW Camp known as working camp 93 was established in 1943 initially to house Italian P.O.W.s. In 1944 the Italians were dispersed to make way for German POWs deemed to be of low security risk. The camp ceased to function by summer 1948.

The camp consists of 49 purpose built huts which include 2 exceptional buildings,the first is a theatre which has a purpose built stage,orchestra pit and auditorium rising up in broad steps with the remains of decorated interior panels still surviving. The second building is a canteen, a building set aside for relaxation and social activity which includes a series of painted wall panels showing typical German scenes, the Rhine Valley, animals, woodland and lakeland scenes.In 2002 english heritage gave the camp ancient Monument status making Harperley the only one of its kind in England.

Three people have been charged after police in York Region, Canada, investigated hundreds of thefts from local cemeteries over the summer.

Investigators say more than 600 bronze nameplates and vases were taken from Beechwood Cemetery and Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Vaughan as well as Holy Cross Cemetery and Christ the King Cemetery in Markham since August.

Police say two men were seen using a pry bar to remove bronze name plates from several headstones on Sept. 15 at around 7 p.m. Authorities were called to the scene and two suspects were arrested.

Archaeologists on Tuesday unveiled what they think are the remains of Roman emperor Nero's extravagant banquet hall, a circular space that rotated day and night to imitate the Earth's movement and impress his guests. The room, part of Nero's Golden Palace, a sprawling residence built in the first century A.D., is thought to have been built to entertain government officials and VIPs, said lead archaeologist Francoise Villedieu.

The emperor, known for his lavish and depraved lifestyle, ruled from 37 A.D. to 68 A.D.

The dig so far has turned up the foundations of the room, the rotating mechanism underneath and part of an attached space believed to be the kitchens, she said.

• Improved: Common lines of the paternal and maternal ancestry charts are now included in each chart. Previously, a cross-line cousin marriage would report the common ancestral line in the paternal chart, but not repeat it in the maternal.
• Improved: In French language reports, a non-breaking space is now included before each colon and semi-colon.
• Improved: The Bavarian name prefix "in" is now formatted as a lowercase name prefix (similar to German "von").
• Fixed: In Spanish language reports, the erroneously formatted "Chozn{¬o/a}" is now reported as "Generación de 4ta Nietos" in generation sub-headings.

• There is a new utility under File, Utilities, to look for an infinite loop. If any of the reports say you might have an infinite loop, then run this utility to see which person is causing the problem.

Changes:

• The biggest change in 6.3.23 is the new option under File, Options, to set the margins to centimeters. Since this affects almost all of the reports, and also affects when printing pictures, please report if you have any problems with this new option.
• New translation program.

Two revolvers that were the gift to a Civil War era soldier in Watertown drew a $135,000 bid Sunday in an auction in California.

An unidentified winning bidder becomes the owner of Colt Model 1851 Navy revolvers contained in a case that included a diamond-shaped plaque that was engraved, "Presented to Col. Wm. C. Browne by his friends at Watertown N.Y."

A pre-Civil War infantryman, the colonel was among the first enlistees in the 35th New York Volunteer Regiment when hostilities broke out between the Union and the Confederacy.

Outright Distribution has sold the forthcoming US version of Who Do You Think You Are? into Australia.

Australia’s Nine Network has picked up broadcast rights to the US adapation of the genealogical show, made by British indie Wall to Wall. It is due to launch in the US on NBC in January next year featuring Lisa Kudrow, Sarah Jessica Parker and Susan Sarandon amongst others.

Nine has also picked up 6 x 60-minute ob doc series Sea Patrol, also distributed by Outright and produced by Wall to Wall, which aired on National Geographic UK over the summer.

Walter Breuning, The World's Oldest Man,was born on born Sept. 21, 1896 in Melrose Minnesota and inherited the title of "World's Oldest Man" when Henry Allingham of England died last July 18. Breuning moved to Great Falls in 1918 with the expansion of the railroad and worked in the railroad business for 50 years. He says he stays healthy by eating just two meals per day and exercises by strolling the halls of the retirement home with the aid of a walker. Breuning, born in Melrose, Minnesota, also revealed that he takes one aspirin a day.

Walter Breuning speaks to guests during his 113th birthday party in the Rainbow retirement home ballroom, Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, in Great Falls, Montana. World's oldest man Walter Breuning celebrated his 113th birthday on September 21. The American supercentenarian blew the candles and gave a brief talk at the Rainbow Retirement Community in Great Falls, Montana.

A 219-year-old document that stemmed from alcohol tariffs to pay off Revolutionary War debts -- and signed by Alexander Hamilton -- became the property of The National Archives on Thursday.

The historic letter, which has been the property of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for the past 35 years, chronicles the federal government's earliest efforts to regulate alcohol.

In the document, Hamilton, the first United States secretary of the Treasury, discusses tools for customs agents to determine -- for tax purposes -- the alcohol content of St. Croix rum and other imported spirits.

A Humboldt family's concrete project is on hold while experts figure out what a construction crew found under the pavement. A skid loader operator dug up the mysterious object Wednesday morning. It's a slab of stone with the name "Gengler" on it. Some people think it's most likely a nameplate that was attached to a gate or the sidewalk decades ago. But others think it just might be a grave marker.

Workers installing a new driveway for the Jensens will have to wait until a state archeologist examines the "yardifact." People around town have raised some intriguing theories, including the possibility that it's a grave stone.

Firemen were still fighting a fire after 24 hours, at a storage space where some 50,000 industrial companies’ archives are kept by the company Secur-archiv, 24 Heures reported late Friday afternoon 25 September.

The fire, noticed Thursday afternoon by two employees who called fireman after seeing flames at the Avenue de Provence company, is now being doused with water, says the newspaper. The company took over the storage area seven years ago from UBS, it reports, which also kept records there, but no longer does.

Microsoft says that some web sites may not be displayed correctly or work correctly in Windows Internet Explorer 8. This problem does not occur in earlier versions of Internet Explorer, and the affected web sites continue to be displayed correctly and to work correctly in Windows Internet Explorer 7.

For example, you may experience any of the following symptoms in Internet Explorer 8:

• Menus, images, or text are in the wrong positions on some web sites.
• Some web site features do not work.
• You receive script error messages on some web sites.
• Internet Explorer stops working or crashes on some web sites.

Internet Explorer 8 includes a Compatibility View feature that displays web sites that were created for older browsers as they were designed to appear.

• Open the web site that is not displayed correctly or that does not work correctly in Internet Explorer 8.
• Click the Compatibility View button that is located directly to the right side of the address bar next to the Refresh button.

• Or, on the Tools menu, click Compatibility View.

GeneaNet uses multiple domain names and you must enable Compatibility View for all of the domain names that are not displayed correctly:

Today's Scandinavians are not descended from the people who came to Scandinavia at the conclusion of the last ice age but, apparently, from a population that arrived later, concurrently with the introduction of agriculture. This is one conclusion of a new study straddling the borderline between genetics and archaeology, which involved Swedish researchers and which has now been published in the journal Current Biology.

"The hunter-gatherers who inhabited Scandinavia more than 4,000 years ago had a different gene pool than ours," explains Anders Götherström of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University, who headed the project together with Eske Willerslev of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.

Have you hit a brick wall in your Swedish research or don't know where to begin?

A group of four Swedish genealogists are touring the United States for the sole purpose of helping Swedish-Americans learn more about their heritage. These four individuals participated in previous SwedGen tours and have decided to continue the tradition with the new SwedGen Roadtour 2009. On previous trips, the group was successful in helping many individuals get started with their research as well as breaking down many brick walls. This year the group will make the following stops:

Public access to historical records is being put at risk by cuts at the National Archives, a prominent historian said today.

The broadcaster Saul David, who fronts shows such as the BBC's Timewatch, said he feared a reduction in opening from six to five days a week, which was announced by the records centre in south-west London, would be the start of a series of cuts to the public service it provided.

The National Archives, based in Kew, confirmed it would reduce its public opening and introduce car parking charges of up to £350 a year as part of an attempt to save 10% of its £42m operating budget.

American internet giant Google went on trial in Paris Thursday on charges of copyright infringement and forgery in its attempt to digitize millions of the world's books without prior authorization. The trial was provoked in 2006 by the head of the publishing group La Martiniere, Herve de La Martiniere, who is now backed by the 530-member French Publisher's Association (SNE) and the Society of Authors (SGDL).

The daily La Tribune reported Thursday that Google plans to argue that a French judge has no jurisdiction in the dispute, because it is based on American law; digitizing is not copying; and that posting brief excerpts from books online is permitted under French law.

The SNE's Christine de Mazieres told the daily La Tribune that about 100,000 French books had been digitized by Google without authorization.

• Fixed: The version from yesterday had a problem where the program would stop if you were sending a Group sheet to a file.
• Changed: When making a book report, it used to put a comma before the ( ) sections, but now it does not.

A U.S. Census worker found hanged from a tree near a Kentucky cemetery had the word "fed" scrawled on his chest, a law enforcement official said Wednesday, and the FBI is investigating whether he was a victim of anti-government sentiment.

The law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and requested anonymity, did not say what type of instrument was used to write the word on the chest of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and teacher. He was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky.

The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation. An autopsy report is pending.

Life Inc. announced today that more than 1,860 issues from the LIFE Archive are now available online through Google Books. The scanned magazines cover LIFE Magazine issues from 1936-1972, allowing readers to search and view full content from these legendary pages.

This announcement follows a previous partnership between Google and Life Inc. in November 2008, with LIFE making the contents of its image collection available through Google Image Search. The LIFE photography collection on Google Image Search includes more than 10 million images.

The Archives of Michigan today helped put history ? vivid, you-are-there history ? into the hands and on the computer screens of Michigan and Civil War enthusiasts everywhere. Today marked the launch of the digitized collection of Mack and Nan Ewing Civil War Letters, available on the Seeking Michigan Web site, www.SeekingMichigan.org. The collection – believed to be the largest set of Civil War letters ever given to a state archives – was donated by Grand Haven resident Dr. Wallace K. Ewing, the great-grandson of Mack and Nan Ewing.

According to Dr. Ewing, the collection includes letters penned by his Ewing ancestors and their friends and covers a roughly nine-year period from 1856 to 1865, though the bulk of the letters were written in 1864 and 1865. The collection has been passed down through the generations for some 150 years and includes 291 well-preserved letters, nearly all of which have matching envelopes with canceled stamps.

September 10, 2009 marked the 100th anniversary of the National Library of China. Reporters learned that the National Library is now popularizing new reading channels, enabling citizens to access content from the National Library through their digital TV. By the end of this year, more than 300,000 Beijing citizens will enjoy this service.

With a hundred-year history, the library now has an area of more than 250,000 square meters, making it the third largest library in the world; it has a collection of 27 million books, making it among the top five in the world; its daily attendance of 20,000 guests is unrivaled in the world.

Currently, there is Internet access at every desk in the buildings of the north part of the library, and wireless Internet covers the whole library; in the China Digital Library for the Blind, blind people can listen to digital books and music as well as online lectures for free.

By order and at the expense of Austrian foundation Socrates, the Hamburg based docWORKS specialist CCS Content Conversion Specialists has digitised the “Wiener Zeitung” (Viennese Newspaper) with all its supplements: “Wiener Abendpost” (Vienna Evening Mail), “Amtsblatt” (Gazette) and “Zentralanzeiger für Handel und Gewerbe” (Official Trade and Commerce Bulletin). The Wiener Zeitung is part of the stock of the Austrian National Library. The project covers the volumes from 1909 to 1923 and has a total of 100.000 pages. The Wiener Zeitung is the oldest Austrian newspaper that is still being published today, having started in 1703 as the “Wienerisches Diarium” (Viennese Daily). Its Gothic type represents a tough challenge for OCR (optical character recognition). The digitising process includes automatic analysis of the papers’ layout (captions, columns etc) – this will later enable searches to be performed within an article.

Pictures printed in books published before the development of chemical photography, in the 1820s, were so much more significant than those printed today. In these pre-photographical times, pictures were essential for the recording and sharing of knowledge, whether scientific, geographical or cultural.

Because many pictures served the same purpose that photographs do today, they had to at least appear accurate. Pictures were, therefore, drawn with an astounding level of detail, which makes them a pleasure to behold to this day.

The fourth-annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar will feature exhibits by 60 local historical collections, book-signings by L.A. authors, documentary films about hidden L.A. stories, information about family genealogy and a wealth of other resources for exploring Southern California history. The event returns to the USC Davidson Conference Center on Saturday, October 17, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The bazaar is presented by L.A. as Subject, an association of historical collections hosted by the USC Libraries.

At this year’s bazaar, visitors will be able to browse the collections of L.A. as Subject members, including the Academy Film Archive, All the Saints of the City of the Angels, the Autry National Center of the American West, El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, the Filipino American Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles City Archives, the Mayme Clayton Library, the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, the Pasadena Museum of History, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and the USC Libraries Special Collections.

Axiell (formerly DS), the market leader in UK public libraries and archives and part of the Axiell Library Group AB, announced that the City of Westminster (www.westminster.gov.uk) has moved to a fully managed service with its upgrade to Axiell’s fully web-based CalmView user interface to manage its archives collection. CalmView also offers internet access to its WestCat archives collection.

The City of Westminster is taking advantage of CalmView’s new easy-to-use configuration options to create their own image gallery which promotes access to their extensive image collection by pushing useful images directly to the public as they search.

A professor has become a patron for the original manuscript of Auld Lang Syne after paying £10,000.

It was predicted last month the famous Robert Burns work could have fetched as much as £50,000 in a private agreement with the National Trust for Scotland, but the figure was agreed earlier this month.

However, the buyer, Professor David Purdie will not be able to take the work, written in 1788, home.

Instead the 62-year-old retired professor of medicine will become a "patron" for his lifetime of the 18th century manuscript, which will be kept in the new Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway, South Ayrshire.

Dee is regarded as one of the period's leading scholars, who cast horoscopes for Queen Mary and her Spanish husband, Philip, and suggested the most auspicious date for the coronation of Elizabeth I.

But he was also said to use crystal balls to communicate with angels and collaborated with a conman who assured him the angels had suggested a spot of wife-swapping.

Now a group of international scholars gathered in Cambridge has tried to restore his reputation, four centuries on.

"If you're looking for one of the most original thinkers of his day, in touch with all the major intellectuals of Europe, consulted by princes, right at the cutting edge of mathematical theory, author of the preface of the first English edition of Euclid, owner of the greatest private library in England and one of the best in Europe, that's Dee.” said Jenny Rampling, who organised the weekend two-day conference at Dee's old college, St John’s.

The roof of the church where William Shakespeare's remains lie is in danger of collapse, the group dedicated to the church's preservation said on Monday.

The Friends of Shakespeare's Church charity said on their website that the beams of the chancel roof of Holy Trinity church in Shakespeare's birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, England, which sits above the bard's bust, gravestone and final resting place, are rotting and could collapse.

The 800-year-old church is already undergoing renovation work and the rotting beams have added an extra wrinkle and additional costs to efforts to preserve it.

Penn's libraries are busy making thousands of hard-to-find books and publications available online in a multifaceted effort intended to make rare literature more available to academics at Penn and around the world.

Of the University's 5.7 million volumes, nearly 300,000 are rare books and manuscripts, only readable on campus or by short-term loan.

Joe Zucca, director for Planning and Communication for Penn Libraries, aims to change that. "Demand is immediate," he said. "Online access is invaluable for research purposes."

In addition to several in-house projects, the University has engaged in partnerships with Kirtas Technologies, Lyrasis Mass Digitization and other groups.

Thousands of letters from southern Indiana military members who served during World War II are now online as part of the Indiana Memory project.

The Charlestown-Clark County Public Library houses the collection of 1,600 letters and other correspondence with Jesse Dorsey, who ran a cement company newsletter during the war and wrote to about 350 servicemen and women from the Sellersburg and Speed areas of Clark County.

The library used a grant and help from Indiana University to scan the letters and cards from the Dorsey collection into a digital format. It took two years to digitize the collect, said library director Tamsie Meurer, but the letters can now be read online at www.in.gov/memories.

For weeks, Randy Joubert and Gary Nisbet laughed off customers’ comments that the two furniture deliverymen looked similar enough to be brothers.

It wouldn’t be long before fate would prove the old adage, the customer is always right.

Joubert said something in him clicked after yet another customer asked the same question during a routine delivery in late August.

Prefacing his line of questioning with the statement, “Don’t think I’m weird,” Joubert asked his co-worker a few pointed questions based on names and dates gleaned from his own adoption records.

Seconds later, Joubert realized that the man who had been on the other end of countless couches, mattresses and recliners since July wasn’t just a co-worker. Nisbet was the long-lost brother for whom he had been searching.

This map originates from a large scale map of London compiled and engraved by Edward Weller F.R.G.S., issued in parts as supplements to the Weekly Dispatch newspaper during 1861 and 1862. The map consisted of nine sheets on a scale of 9⅜" to 1 statue mile. This map predates Edward Stanford's Library Map of London (Hyde No. 91) produced for the 1862 International Exhibition, and Weller's map is on a much larger scale than Stanford's 6" to 1 mile Library map.

The map was purchased by Alfred John Owen on a trip to England from Australia around 1880. Upon Alfred's death the map passed to his daughter Lyzette Owen, and it remained in possession of the Owen family of Victoria, Australia, from the 1880s until 2007, when it was purchased by MAPCO for display on the MAPCO : Map And Plan Collection Online website.

Use the thumbnail map at the top of each page to navigate your way around the map.

Secretary of State Robin Carnahan has announced that the Missouri State Archives, a division of her office, has been awarded a $65,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. The Missouri Historical Records Advisory Board will distribute the majority of these funds to Missouri’s local records repositories for preservation and access projects. The grant will also be used to provide preservation training workshops across the state.

The Missouri Historical Records Grant Program will be available to all of the state’s public and private records repositories that care for documents of significant historical value.

Grant funds may be used for records management and preservation projects, such as conservation services, consulting, indexing and description of collections, and the purchase of archival supplies and equipment.

Families of three Navy crewmen killed in an Antarctica plane crash during World War II vow to retrieve the bodies without U.S. government help, officials say.

U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus denied the request of 40 surviving family members to recover the bodies buried near what is known as the George One crash site.

Earlier, naval officials recommended supporting a recovery expedition when conditions were right. A release from George 1 Repatriation Project said the families were going ahead with efforts to retrieve the bodies without Navy assistance.

The casualties were crewmen of a plane that a crashed in the Antarctic 62 years ago. They were Ensign Maxwell A. Lopez, 20, of Newport, R.I., the flight's navigator; Chief Petty Officer Fred Williams, 26, , of Huntington, Tenn., an aviation machinist's mate 1st Class, Silver Star recipient and Pearl Harbor survivor; and Chief Petty Officer Wendell "Bud" Hendersin, 25, of Sparta, Wis., an aviation radioman 1st Class. There were six survivors.

When did a lavatory become a loo? And why were Victorian trousers "unmentionables"? The world's first historical thesaurus, which is to be published after more than 40 years of research, claims to have the answers.

Loved by writers, not to mention crossword cheats, Roget's Thesaurus has never been out of print since it was published in 1852 to "assist in literary composition".

The best known dictionary of its kind, which groups synonyms - words with similar meanings - has been a source of reference for more than 150 years. But a new beast is emerging from Britain's vast ocean of words, a colossus to rival Roget.

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, is the culmination of 44 years of painstaking work by scholars at the University of Glasgow.

The Cleveland Jewish News has finalized plans to create a digital archive of 45 years of CJN publications. The project is expected to be online next year.

“This is an exciting stage in the newspaper’s history,” says Barry R. Chesler, president of the CJN Foundation. “Imagine being able to have at your fingertips, no matter where you are, information about family simchahs, news events and anything else that’s been important to you or the community for half a century.”

Funding for the project comes from the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland’s Endowment Fund, the CJN, and proceeds from the CJN Foundation’s “Making Headlines” tribute event in June.

Google’s plan to digitize copyrighted books is under legal attack. But the Internet giant is stepping up its PR offensive to convince consumers of the benefits wrought by its broader book scanning project.

The contraption pictured here can produce bound paperback books, from hard-to-find works of literature to little-known cookbooks, in a matter of minutes.

The machine itself is not Google’s; it’s the creation of On Demand Books. On Wednesday, the companies announced a deal giving On Demand and its Espresso Machine access to Google’s digital library of 2 million public domain titles.

Until now, the works digitized by Google were available only as digital files for reading on computer screens or electronic readers. With the Espresso machine, the companies say, consumers will be able to bury their noses in old-fashioned, hardcopy versions of their desired books – many of which have been have been out of print for years.

The commandment to "be fruitful and multiply" the Krishevsky family follows quite closely. Last Saturday, the great grandmother, Rachel Krishevsky passed away at the age of 99, leaving behind no less than 1,400 children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and even great-great-grandchildren.

Krishevsky got married to her cousin, Yitzhak, just before turning 19. The couple brought seven sons and four daughters into the world. In accordance with haredi custom, Krishevsky brought up her children to see children as a great joy. Her children subsequently adopted her outlook and produced 150 children of their own.

These 150 children continued the commitment to be fruitful and multiply and themselves had no less than 1,000 children. From here, the lineage continued even further, and Rachel Krishevsky was blessed with a few hundred great-great-grandchildren.

• Dramatically reduces the time it takes to get your work done.
• Allows you to manage your time and resources much more efficiently.
• Gives you the power to create killer presentations with less effort.
• And lets you collaborate effortlessly with your team members.

The Merry Cemetery (Romanian: Cimitirul Vesel) is a cemetery in the village of Sãpânta, Maramures county, Romania,that is famous for its colourful tombstones with the native paintings that represent scenes from the life of the buried persons and even poetry in which those persons are described.

The cemetery has its origin in some crosses sculpted by Ioan Stan Patras ,born 1908 - died 1977,his own grave will be seen here ,made by himself before dying. In 1935, Patras sculpted the first epitaph and since the 1960s, the whole cemetery was populated with over 800 such crosses, sculpted from oak wood, and it became an open-air museum and a tourist attraction.His work will be continued by one of his learners,by Dumitru Pop,restaurating now old and creating new tombstones.

A selection of incredible images from The National Archives in London. Start exploring the collection with this fascinating app.

Order prints of any image through the pixidapps online store powered by Zazzle. Select your favorites, save to your photoroll, email your friends, bring a bit of history into your home or workplace.

Every image in this mobile museum is captioned with vital additional information. Brush up on the history you didn’t know you needed to know: Kings and Queens, two world wars, Victorian Britain, the British Empire, Soccer, the Declaration of Independence. Quirky, atmospheric images from a past age.

The ancient city of Rome was not built in a day. It took nearly a decade to build the Colosseum, and almost a century to construct St. Peter's Basilica. But now the city, including these landmarks, can be digitized in just a matter of hours.

A new computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington uses hundreds of thousands of tourist photos to automatically reconstruct an entire city in about a day.

The tool is the most recent in a series developed at the UW to harness the increasingly large digital photo collections available on photo-sharing Web sites. The digital Rome was built from 150,000 tourist photos tagged with the word "Rome" or "Roma" that were downloaded from the popular photo-sharing Web site, Flickr.

To Tasmania's Aboriginal community it is "racist art", an enduring symbol of the persecution, murder and dispossession their ancestors suffered under white colonial rule.

More than 130 years after her death, a bust of Tasmania's most famous Aboriginal woman, Truganini, is at the centre of controversy, with demands it be returned to her homeland by the British Museum which owns it.

Now representatives of the community have flown to Britain in the hope of reclaiming the plaster cast, along with remains of other ancestors still held by medical and academic institutions in the UK.

Thirty-nine living relatives of Adolf Hitler have been discovered by Belgian researchers after they claim to have decoded the Nazi dictator's DNA.

Analysing forgotten cigarette butts in a small village in Lower Austria, a used paper napkin in a New York fast food restaurant and the seals of letters sent over 30 years ago from northern France, Marc Vermeeren and Jean-Paul Mulders say they have traced all known living relatives of the Fuehrer for the first time.

As well as three living in America, whose existence has been reported on before, they also claim to have tracked down 36 others who still live in the wooded area of Austria where Hitler was born.

A skeleton found at an ancient Roman site in Britain has researchers wondering if they've stumbled on a murder mystery.

Excavations at the buried town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St. Edmund in Norfolk, England, found what, for now, archaeologists are terming a "highly unusual" setup.

"This is an abnormal burial," said archaeologist Will Bowden of the University of Nottingham. "The body, which is probably male, was placed in a shallow pit on its side, as opposed to being laid out properly. This is not the care Romans normally accorded to their dead. It could be that the person was murdered or executed, although this is still a matter of speculation."

As footage of the weird and wonderful inventions that defined Tomorrow's World is released online from the BBC archives, it is a good time to remember how much of the technology we now take for granted was demonstrated for the very first time on Tomorrow's World.

The home computer, the mobile telephone and the compact disc all made their debut on the show.

It was a historian's nightmare. During the change from the Clinton to the Bush administration, Web sites affiliated with the Clinton White House went dark, and an unknown number of online documents and files were forever lost.

Such Internet deaths inspired the Cyber Cemetery at the University of North Texas, which preserves government Web sites in their final form. The Cyber Cemetery archives sites when commissions or panels expire, allowing the online work of defunct government bodies to live on and remain accessible to the public.

The virtual graveyard was born in the late 1990s when a group of university librarians noticed that Web sites affiliated with the Clinton administration were disappearing.

French Prime Minister François Fillon has endorsed the idea that Google might digitise some books and documents of the French National Library. Closing a government seminar on the digital economy last week, he said that "Google is not a problem, but a challenge". Fillon dismissed the recent uproar over reports that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) was in negotiations with Google. "It would be shocking if it (the BNF) were not doing so," he declared.

During a roundtable chaired by Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand, Google France chief Mats Carduner said he had offered to transmit to the BNF and the European digital library Europeana all the out-of-copyright French language books digitised by Google in the United States.

Terms of Use and Privacy Policy: Users will not upload materials that violate rights of privacy and copyright, users will not upload materials that contain any reference to persons who were born less than 75 years ago, screenshots are not allowed and will be automatically removed.

Then, fill in the form by entering the source of the document (archive, library, Internet, etc.), the place and date of the event, some notes and your personal reference.

Gertrude Noone was a 44-year-old insurance policy clerk for Travelers in Hartford, Conn., in 1943 when she enlisted in the Women's Army Corps.

When she died peacefully Thursday morning at age 110 at an assisted-living facility in Milford, Conn., she was the oldest known living military veteran in the world -- a fact that made her proud.

Noone, who rose to the rank of sergeant first class, was chief clerk of the large dispensary at Ft. Myer, Va., by the time she left the Army in 1949. She then worked as an administrative assistant at a private psychiatric hospital in Stamford, Conn., until retiring in 1962.

Residents of one village starved of reliable broadband had their prayers answered when they discovered a local graveyard five miles away got a good signal.

But businesspeople in Mullinahone, near the Tipperary/Kilkenny border, are still angry that their village is so poorly served that they have travel to Kilbride cemetery several times a week to download material from the internet and to send emails.

The cemetery is located within the Vodafone broadband coverage area for nearby Callan town.

• Improved: Entries that contains an address but not a place are no longer reported in the Index of Places.
• Fixed: Processing of Family Historian __LIVING and __PRIVATE flags.
• Fixed: Rare situations where an incorrect family tree number was referenced from the narrative sections.

• Fixed: Bugs and Unexpected Program Errors related to editing the Place Library.
• Improved: When the Place Library window is cancelled, any changes made are reversed.
• Incorporates changes to reporter module; see revision history for The Complete Genealogy Reporter.

• New sample database of British Monarchy now included.
• Editing supports entering of latitude/longitude for events / facts based off curent location.
• GEDCOM export of full database or just the changes from a given date. Export via the built-in web server or email (email export only available with OS 3.0 or above).
• Improved import speed.
• Supported added for COMM tag in submission records.
• Upper case names are now sorted correctly alongside lowercase names.
• Fixes for crashing when importing.
• Fixed problem with accented characters not being searchable.
• Improved support for handling errors in GEDCOM files.
• Fixed map support for family events.

• Changes for translators. 14 new lines.
• On the Custom Lists screen, if you picked the fields for Flags, those numbers were not saved if you picked File, Save Report Layout.
• If you were using a version from the last 30 days, and if you have a large database and if some people have the Common Law marriage event, then you might have received an Overflow error, and this version fixes that problem.

Gordon Brown has said he is sorry for the "appalling" way World War II code breaker Alan Turing was treated for being gay.

A petition on the No 10 website had called for a posthumous government apology to the computer pioneer.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for gross indecency after admitting a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

The campaign was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming. He was seeking an apology for the way the mathematician was treated after his conviction. He also wrote to the Queen to ask for Turing to be awarded a posthumous knighthood.

File this under odd symbolism. Lonnie Holloway, of Saluda, S.C., was buried in the front seat of his 1973 Pontiac Catalina on Tuesday. Both were lowered into the grave by a crane.

Watching The Associated Press video of the funeral and the emerald green Pontiac being lowered into the earth, it almost seemed like a funeral for the brand, which General Motors killed off in June.

Mr. Holloway, who died last week at age 90, outlived Pontiac by only a few months.

"He said, 'They’re going to have me with my hat on, driving down the road,' and I said I’m going to be there. That’s what he wanted. I know that sounds crazy," Malcom Jones, a friend of Mr. Holloway, told WLTX.com.

A U.S. Navy patrol boat sunk during WWII has been found and photographed 20 miles off Cape Hatteras, N.C.

The wreck of the YP-389, a converted fishing trawler, rests in about 300 feet of water in a region known as the "Graveyard of the Atlantic," where several U.S. and British naval vessels, merchant ships, and German U-boats sunk during the Battle of the Atlantic.

Six sailors died when the YP-389 was attacked by a German submarine June 19, 1942. There were 18 survivors.

The remains of 250 soldiers killed at the Battle of Fromelles in northern France have been recovered after a four-month archaeological operation.

The remains from the group burial at Pheasant Wood will be reburied with full military honours at a new military cemetery close to the site. German forces buried the Australian and British soldiers after the 1916 battle. Soldiers from Bristol, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire were heavily involved in the fighting.

The excavation, which began in May 2008, was carried out by Oxford Archaeology whose final day in the field will be 14 September. DNA samples have been taken from every soldier and specialists in the UK are attempting to extract DNA strands from the samples to help the identification process.

In the 1930s the Maginot Line was viewed as a military marvel, an impregnable network of underground fortifications stretching along France's border with Germany — from Belgium to Switzerland — designed to stop the Nazi onslaught and prevent a repeat of the bloody trench warfare of World War I.

But then in 1940, the Germans simply bypassed the vast, hugely expensive network of bastions, bunkers, tunnels and artillery batteries, and the Maginot Line turned into a metaphor for exaggerated military confidence resulting in disaster.

History buffs and military enthusiasts from around the world now come to tour some of the amazing subterranean forts which began reopening for visitors in the 1980s. Guided tours, including rides on electric trains that once ferried troops and ammunition from fort to fort through tunnel networks, are available from April to October.

A Swedish woman said the National Archives rejected her request for permission to tattoo the Greater National Coat of Arms on her wrist.

The 19-year-old Solvesborg woman said she wrote a letter to the National Archives saying she wanted to express her patriotism by tattooing the Greater National Coat of Arms or the Swedish flag on her wrist, Swedish news agency TT reported Wednesday.

Henrik Klackenberg, chief heraldist at the National Archives, said in a response to the woman that the coat of arms is the personal crest of the head of state and is usually reserved for use by the king, the armed forces, the Swedish parliament and other government departments.

Old news will be new again with a project the University of South Carolina is starting to put newspapers published between 1860 and 1922 into a computer database. The Post and Courier of Charleston reports the university's libraries have obtained a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the project.

Digital librarian Kate Boyd says the project will scan 100,000 pages of old South Carolina newspapers and make them available through the Library of Congress' database.

The first phase should be ready by 2011, the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Boyd says an advisory board will select more than a dozen newspapers to start the project. The university plans to create a Web site for the South Carolina newspapers that is separate from the Library of Congress site.

A mystery revolving around President Barack Obama’s Irish roots was solved when a tomb containing the remains of Obama’s Irish ancestor was discovered in the Irish medieval city of Kilkenny.

After a painstaking search, film maker Gabriel Murray, who is in the process of making a documentary on Obama's Irish roots, finally found “Obama’s Lost Tomb” inside the 13th century St. Canice’s Cathedral.

Murray, along with Cathedral assistant Frances Moore, used a centuries-old map to identify a hidden vault under the floor of St. Canice’s. They deciphered the Latin on the hundreds of tombs inside the vault, when they came across Bishop John Kearney’s resting place, number 19 on the map, just 20 yards from the main entrance.

Several four-wheel drives with tinted windows, dumpers and excavators surrounded centuries-old Syed Majno graveyard on Sunday morning and razed a portion of the boundary wall of the historical graveyard, panicking the residents of nearby villages that are scattered on both sides of the Thatta-bound National Highway. Most of these villages are located in Deh Pipri in Bin Qasim Town, near Ghaghar Phatak.

The annoyed villagers rushed to the graveyard to protest against the razing, where they discovered that these vehicles were excavating earth to fill the site of an under-construction factory.

This is not the first time when the residents of ancient villages in the outskirts of the city were facing such a tragedy, but their miseries are too many to mention at once.

All genealogists are asked to nominate their favorite genealogy blogs between September 3 and September 30, 2009. Once nominations are received, visitors to Family Tree Magazine will vote for their favorites from October 5 to November 5, 2009.

• Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) - fixed an incompatibility with Reunion and Snow Leopard where family files would not open if they had source citations visible on the family card. Also fixed the display of source citations in note fields.
• Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) - fixed an incompatibility with Reunion and Snow Leopard when compacting family files while displaying children and parents in the list format.
• iDisk/MobileMe - fixed some problems when uploading web reports to iDisk.
• iDisk/MobileMe - replaced references to .mac (dot mac) with MobileMe.
• Sorting Children - when sorting children on the family card, the modified date for the family card will be updated.
• Printing - improved printing quality of PDF objects pasted in charts.
• Web Reports - fixed a problem on Intel Macs when generating Google Analytics code.
• LDS - fixed a bug when applying temple date and code to marked people.
• LDS/GEDCOM Import - submitted status of LDS events will no longer be lost if a date is present.
• Manual - several improvements in the manual.
• Web Styles - several improvements to .css files.

• LDS Screen - Fixed an error 5 problem.
• Pedigree Web Pages - Fixed some info that was showing for a Private person.
• Potential Problems - report of Seal to Parents having been done before baptism for spouse was sometimes being shown when it wasn't the case.
• Reports in Standard Edition - Fixed some Privacy issues.

• Adding or editing a parent did not correctly redraw their spouse's link line in the Tree Area. Fixed.
• Adding more than one object to a person or family caused a "Duplicate key" error. Fixed.
• Database engine update to V4.28 build 6.

• Now fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
• If a bezier shape is left open, it can be double-clicked in order to continue adding control points (ie. to close the shape).
• If a bezier shape is being edited and the delete key is pressed, the last segment of the line is removed.
• Individual control points in a bezier shape can now be selected and deleted or moved using the arrow keys.
• When a page is being dragged to a new position in the page table, the table scrolls much slower making it much easier to reorganize pages.
• The Smart Inspector window now dynamically repositions itself as the main window is moved.

• Fixed bug: At unequal box heights, the child connection lines from partner connection lines were not drawn completely.
• Fixed bug: If in the Edit Free Geo Objects dialog the last available object was deleted, after a click on one of the buttons OK or Apply an access violation was reported. After quitting the message you could only cancel.
• Now a window with a vertical scrollbar is used to show the results of the integrity check so that very long lists are also readable completely.
• For extending and reducing the zoom factor now not only the plus/minus buttons in the number block but also those in the letter block of the keyboard can be used. This is helpful at notebook computers without number block.
• The Edit Free Text Objects und Edit Free Image Objects dialogs were made more clear by use of tabs.
• At GEDCOM Import, two identical MARR tags without type detail are interpreted as civil and religious marriage data.
• There is a new GEDCOM Import Option: 'Civil' and 'religious' marriage data... should be swapped. Using this option, problems can be solved if double marriage data were coded into two identical MARR tags without type detail.
• There is a new GEDCOM Import Option: The content of a "2 NPFX" tag... should be inserted before the surname.
• Some small improvements and corrections.

• Changes for translators. It may take the translators several days to update the language files.
• Users can enter in Options the 3 symbols for born, died, married (since some countries do not use the same symbols).

If you have already upgraded to Snow Leopard, contact them to send you a link. Alternatively, if you are a member of the forum you can use the link in the new members section. (You will need to login).

iFamily now works exceptionally well on Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard Mac OS's. It even still works on the older ppc Macs.

If you have not already upgraded to Snow Leopard, use "Download Latest Release..." from the iFamily Menus before doing so.

• Unsupported Browsers: You complained and we listened. We removed the header that would appeared if you were not using a Record Search supported browser. For the most part unsupported browsers still work, but this header was making the screen shift down so you could not see everything.
• Home Page Layout: The home page has undergone major changes; most noticeable are the new colors, layout, and title & label name changes.
• Where’s the map?: The map and ability to search a specific collection are now accessed by selecting the “Browse our record collections” link. This separates the search functions and templates for searching in all collection vs. a specific collection or browse only collections. We would love your feedback on this change.
• Share a record: Try sharing a record you found in Record Search on Facebook, or in an e-mail or text message.
• Print, Copy & Share Record Details: We think you will love the option to let you print, copy and share the record details.
• About this collection: About this collection link now takes you to the Research Wiki. Having this information in the Wiki makes it easier for us to update and keep it current. It also lets you have Record Search and the user guidance open at the same time to use as a reference.
• Un-Indexed collections: The un-indexed collections or Browse only collections have an entirely new look. You’re now able to keep the context of what images you are browsing, and moving to a different level in the film is a snap.
• Tip of the day: Did you know clicking on the FamilySearch logo in the header will always take you to the home page.

Boxing legend Muhammad Ali was to be honoured Tuesday as the first freeman of a west of Ireland town from where his great-grandfather emigrated to the United States in the 1800s.

Abe Grady left Ennis, County Clare, for Kentucky in the 1860s and his great-grandson went on to become one of the world's greatest boxers, as the first to win the world heavyweight championship title three times.

"It's fantastic. I never thought this would happen," Mayor Frankie Neylon told AFP. "He is definitely the most famous son of Ennis."

As researchers confirm that a Miami cemetery unearthed by construction crews was the final resting place of pioneering black residents, developers erecting a residential complex on the site move to keep what remains of the burial ground.

The mysterious, long-forgotten Lemon City cemetery unearthed by construction crews earlier this year will likely be preserved as a historical monument to the pioneering black Miamians who were buried there in the early 20th century.